Kolinahr and Reasons
by Gabrielle Meik
Summary: After learning of Spock's intentions to attain Kolinahr, Amanda Grayson travels to Earth to visit with Admiral Kirk. Together they embark on a journey to uncover Spock's motivation behind his decision to purge all remaining emotion.
1. i

The Lady Amanda had her hands folded behind her back, cobblestone at her feet and a bundle of tulle around her shoulders. Earth was beautiful. The air was cool and rich and moved quickly. The top point of the golden gate bridge was protruding from the pea-soup fog, and she couldn't stop staring at it. It was twenty-two seventy-two and the middle of September. If she could see the sun it would have told her about early afternoon. Goosebumps were cropping up along the skin of her arms, and she was in heaven. She hadn't been on Earth in over twenty years, and the geography of Starfleet Headquarters was a mystery to her.

She wandered with her head held high for the remainder of the afternoon, and soon it began to rain. The rain fell diagonally and collected in puddles. Sarek would scold her for not asking for help, but she was only human. The rain landed on her face and ran into her collarbones.

The coldest winter I've ever spent was a summer in San Fransisco.

Amanda smiled. The garden was filled with transparent benches and star-gazer lilies and japanese maples. The colors were brilliant ones that she seldom saw protruding from the ground. She found herself in a courtyard, nestled between three buildings set lower to the ground than one would expect. They were constructed of titanium/steel and concrete. The buildings were each connected by transparent sidewalk, under which ran a marshy stream floating with foliage that Amanda could no longer identify. The building she was nearest to was marked "Engineering," and Amanda thought, "Expendable."

She spotted a young cadet crossing the courtyard, his boots making faint ringing sounds against the metal walkway. He was dressed head-to-toe in cranberry red, his ears were round and slightly too big for his head. "Excuse me," she said as he passed her. He stopped and swiveled to face her.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"I'm here for Admiral Kirk. Would you be so kind as to direct me towards his workplace?" The cadet chuckled and pointed toward a building on the other side of the garden.

"He's in the Command building, usually. The higher-ups are on the third floor, but I couldn't tell you what direction to go once you got there. Sorry, Ma'am." He walked away. Amanda shivered and crossed her arms over her stomach, making sure to tuck her hands into her elbows. She saw koi fish slowly meandering under her feet.

Vulcan had no water above ground except that in volcanic hot springs, and the fish who lived in their toxic pools were either microscopic or horrendously ugly. Autonomic Regulation among the Vulcans allowed them to survive on collected rainwater for generations until the first to practice distillation. The emergence of such technology so early in evolution had always intrigued Amanda. Was it the inherent intelligence, or the primal instinct for survival? Did the technology that kept them, as a species, running stem from one part of their brains or the other? If the supressed component of the Vulcan mind was that responsible for their early survival, was Surak wrong?

Towards the dawn of their relationship, their first mindmeld revealed these thoughts to Sarek. He was, of course, outraged. His brow furrowed, he looked at her and those brown eyes were drenched in disapproval. "Surak was right," he said. "Surak saved our species."

"What if he came sooner?" Amanda asked. She was convinced that that was the moment he realized that he loved her.

She laughed. All this from pretty fish?

She climbed the steps to the door of the Command building. The doors were open. She stepped into a room that smelled like metal and cologne. The ceiling was high and transparent. Amanda kept her hands behind her back, sleeves in triangles between her fingers.

She explained to an officer behind the double doors that her name was Amanda Grayson, wife of Sarek, Ambassador of Vulcan to the Federation. and then asked him why he had yet to be replaced by a robot. He said, "I dunno, I'm probably less expensive," and scanned the small metal ID chip in her arm. It was starting to show through her skin, along with all the veins and arteries and digitally inserted rods.

She tried not to bump into people. It was surprisingly quiet, only the sound of work boots on mirrored tiles and the occasional mechanic beeping. She didn't know quite where she was or where she was going. After all, she hadn't known either of those things since she left the docking station. Her aversion to asking for directions still plagued her, and she waited for someone to approach her, but no-one did.

There was a large transparent yellow banner over a flight of stairs, each of them without any apparent connection to the floor, reading _Semper Exploro, _search always_._ Amanda wondered why they still had stairs. It seemed like they should have just replaced them all with small elevators, or something. She lifted her skirt a few centimeters and kept to the right. The rain was sticking to the windows and mingling with itself, running in rivulets when it got too heavy for the surface tension. When it rained on Vulcan, the droplets fell like large rocks would on Earth.

She found a black nameplate reading _Adm. James T. Kirk _on the seventh door after stepping off the stairs at the third floor and selecting a hallway at random. Amanda stood in front of it for a few minutes before she pressed the buzzer with the outstretched index finger of her seldom-used right hand. It opened immediately to a brightly sunlit room that smelled of coffee and pine sol. Amanda stepped over the threshold and it closed behind her with its customary swish. Her heart was pounding in her chest, she should've paused a moment longer before opening the door, he was in the middle of something.

James T. Kirk looked up from his PADD and pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Lieutenant, I hope you've got… _oh._"

Amanda's right hand resumed its position in the crook of her left elbow.

Kirk left a holographic page half-turned and took his feet off the table. "Mrs. Sarek, you're one of those people with the uncanny ability to know when someone needs you, aren't you?" He slid the stylus back into place in the side of his PADD, "so what brings you here?"

"Please, Admiral, my name is Amanda," she said, cocking her head slightly to the left. "And I most certainly do not know when people need me. I simply know when I need people. Human people, specifically."

"Of course," he said, staring at her. At that moment, and for the three weeks preceding it, Amanda Grayson was Jim Kirk's favorite sentient being in the entire galaxy.

"It seems like you haven't left this room in quite a while."

"I can't say I have." Kirk stood up, set his padd beside a traditional two-dimensional chess board, and tugged at the hem of his uniform.

The room had a large bookshelf that spanned the length of the largest wall lacking a window. The books were arranged by century, then topic, then author, and finally, as opposed to date written, in order of personal preference from left to right. Some of the spines were cracked, and she could tell that they were loved deeply, and others had been kept in the best of condition. Amanda wondered whether Kirk had done the breaking in, or if previous owners had. She ran her finger along the twentieth century, until she found one that felt as rough and rigged as a binding could be. "You loved this one?" She stood on her toes and selected a compilation of Aldous Huxley, settled back down and turned the pages between her fingers.

"Yes."

"_Brave new world. _I love this book. It reminds me of high school. I love Terran literature, it's so refreshing. It's amazing to me how eloquently humans can express their thoughts and feelings, how they view the world and what it's becoming," she said.

"Do Vulcans write novels?"

"Not that I know of. I'm sure there's someone somewhere, but they'd never get published, not in a million years. They love foreign fiction, though. It's a sick fascination, I guess." she chuckled the thought and tucked the book back into its respective spot, jammed tight between more new and unused editions. The sun was setting, she could see it blazing red under the blanket of clouds. She padded across the room, still looking out the window. There was a pair of three powder blue armchairs in the corner of the room. She didn't know how to broach the subject. It was still just as painful for her as she imagined it was for him. Lost in thought, she stood for a while before deciding to sit down in the chair closest to the window. Kirk followed her, and placed two mugs of replicated black coffee on an opaque triangular table.

Amanda picked the one closest to her and held it with two fingers under the handle. She couldn't think of a gentle way to put it, because from all angles it was ugly. So she put it bluntly. "We're not going to avoid talking about it forever, so we might as well do it now, and get it over with. I flew all the way out here to this _lowly_ star system of yours in a commercial shuttle, and I'm not leaving until you tell me how you're doing and what happened."

"I take it Spock arrived on Vulcan?" Jim had his forearms on his thighs, his head tipped down.

"Last week. He got there last week, and Sarek found out about it. I don't know what was going through Sarek's head. I think he was planning something, I think he let me know what Spock was doing so I would come back to Earth. He might've just slipped up, but I don't think so. He might've wanted me to spend some time with my own kind, he might've wanted me to talk to you. Either way, I did what we both wanted or I did what I needed to do."

Jim was trying to avoid making eye contact with Amanda, too much concern and too deep and intent and too pale. "You're his mother. I can't imagine."

"It does carry with it a slight feeling of rejection, but all his humanity was just as much your fault as it was mine."

He looked at her, briefly, and then returned to studying his hands. "I wouldn't say that."

"Ha! Of course you wouldn't." Amanda was smiling, showing her teeth. It was Spock's smile, which Jim had only seen once.

_"Captain! Jim!" Spock's hands on his shoulders, his lips stretched ear-to-ear. He was spun around, almost banging into McCoy's desk, and then the smile faded. "I'm pleased to see you, Captain. You seem uninjured. I am at something of a loss to understand it, however." _

He didn't know what was so funny and didn't care. Old frail gorgeous Amanda was sitting in his office and smiling a smile that he would never see again.


	2. ii

Admiral James T. Kirk pushed the door open. It was too heavy and his paper grocery back was slipping out of the arm that carried it. Only those who have been aboard starships cooked their own food. Other people found replicating a luxury. When exactly the meal they were craving appears out of thin air, they never thing about pink and blue balls of gunk. His apartment was a small one, but it had a fantastic view of the bridge. His bookshelves were full and there was paperwork strewn about the floor.

There had been a Vulcan on his sofa for the past twenty-four hours, fingers steepled in front of his face.

"Spock, what's wrong?"

"My current situation is acceptable, Admiral."

"Bullshit." A tomato fell out of the bag and rolled onto the floor.

Spock turned his head and raised an eyebrow. "If I may point out, Jim, that _Bos_, in every species, was driven to extinction by the Twenty-one-thirty spongiform encephalopathy epidemic…"

"_Spock._"

"My apologies. I did not intend to insult your intelligence."

Jim put the groceries on the kitchen counter. He had perishables, but he promised himself he would remember to put them away later. He bent over to pick up the rogue tomato and began tossing it up and letting it fall back into his hand. Kirk leaned against the doorway connecting the kitchen to the living area and stared at Spock with the intention of making him uncomfortable. The ultimate goal was to force him to resign to the fact that this conversation was going to be about his personal well-being no matter how hard he tried to make it about infectious disease in Terran mammals.

Spock knit his eyebrows together.

Jim just stood there leaning against the doorjamb, staring at Spock, who probably wasn't going to die, who wasn't going to answer him and meant to be left to his brooding.

Kirk put the tomato on top of a cherry wood cabinet full of Cochrane-era navigational equipment, and a few _StarWars _figurines. He intentionally crossed the room between Spock and his view of the water, climbed up a flight of titanium steel spiral stairs. The air in the apartment was warm and his office was bland.

His life was occupied too much by _offices_, never enough stars. Jim sat in front of a physical-screen computer terminal summoned half a letter of commendation by voice. The words sat on the screen like dead rodents, part because of the psychological phenomena known as writer's block, and part because the Lieutenant they were praising was something of a lazy ass.

Spock's meditative trance was more melancholy than usual. It was like something was ending, leaving, disappearing, gone. Like something would never be the same, or the whole world would just crumble underneath them.

Spock thinking in his living room was a relatively normal thing, but this was different. There was no solution to this problem. It would be logical to stop thinking about it, but he couldn't help himself. Jim knew Spock's mind like the back of his hand, and something just wasn't right.

There were too many years of staring at the side of his face. Too many years of "my thoughts become your thoughts." Too many years laughing to death when irrationality to be the logical solution to the problem at hand. Xenophobic slurs, times pretending to be dead, explaining Jane Austen's limbic system, watching metabolism voluntarily drop to zero, and now Jim could tell that Spock had stumbled upon, after relentlessly searching for, a very slight and very vital and very definite piece of information that he really, really didn't like. Now Jim could see Spock looking at it from all angles and trying desperately to reason his way out of it.

It was scary. Maybe because of how difficult it was to warrant _this much_ of Spock's attention. Probably because Kirk worried too much, thought too much, and jumped to too many conclusions. This was probably about _Ceti Alpha VI_, which had exploded two days ago and no-one knew why. Not to mention the effect it may have on _Ceti Alpha V, _inhabited by super-human incestuous maniacs, the leader of which he marooned there a few years ago.

He was probably overreacting. No one was going to die.

Jim fell asleep in that office, in his street clothes, at ten o'clock at night. He had just enough consciousness to turn the desk light off. The glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling lit up, and the swivel chair reclined with his weight.

Amanda raised her eyebrow at him. "That was it, he was just sitting there in your livingroom, that was the only thing that happened?"

"And then he told me he was leaving and was gone the next day."

Amanda tilted her head, just a little. "This was two weeks ago?"

"Yes, two weeks."

"Admiral, I have only met you twice, but I assure you, I am no fool."

It was five days, thirteen hours, twenty-seven minutes and forty seconds after falling asleep in his street clothes, overreacting, with his synthetic milk sitting out and not going sour.

Jim's feet were on his desk, mud was rubbing off on the expensive old butcher-block. There was something concerning a breach of the Prime Directive on his lap, taking place on the third planet from Beta Pictoris, referred to as Vhërdring, which was very very wet. A fleet botanist, Donald McCarthy, was collecting stalks of a toxic succulent growing on a cliff face, and the earth gave out underneath him. He was beamed out of the situation mid-fall and within eyeshot of two Vhërdring women tending marsh crops below.

It reminded him of _Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. _The pour kid was being sent to the nearest starbase for court-martial. Part of him wanted to attend in McCarthy's defense. The mistake, though severe, was no-one's fault and did not warrant punishment.

The door slid open. Jim took his feet off the table and looked up from his padd because Spock was the only one who would walk in unannounced, and the only one who consistently knew his lock combinations.

Spock stopped directly in front of him in a turtleneck sweater and his super-vulcan face.

Kirk inclined his head. "What is it, Mr. Spock?"

"Captain, I––"

Jim's mouth opened just a little bit, in between confusion and dread. Overreacting.

"_Admiral,_" Spock corrected, raising his eyebrows about a centimeter. "I do not believe I am able to effectively communicate all that I wish to."

Jim swallowed hard and stood up and moved around the table so about a foot separated him from Spock.

Spock kept his hands clasped behind his back and his eyes on Kirk's forehead. "I do not expect you to understand, however, I _do _owe you whatever explanation I am capable of giving." And then he paused, probably waiting for Kirk to say something, or trying to think of what to say next, because he sounded like the decision to get this over with as quickly as possible. "I _must _return to Vulcan."

Jim opened his mouth to speak and paused, briefly, before doing so. "Why?"

"It is my intention to complete the ritual of _Kolinahr._"

"I don't understand."

"The objective is to achieve _Arei'mnu. Arei'mnu _is not directly translatable into any enduring Earth language." Spock glanced at the floor. "When confronted with the issue during work on the universal translator, Vulcan linguists equated it to _mastery of emotion. _This is not entirely accurate."

Kirk looked at him, not saying anything. Looking at Spock and not saying anything had been pretty much it for a while, but this time it was because there seemed to be nothing worth saying, not because silence was the most appropriate action.

Spock was leaving. Spock was probably never coming back, and if he did it wouldn't mean anything. Spock probably wasn't going to think about him ever again, and if he did, that wouldn't mean anything either. Spock was going to kill Spock.

Maybe it wouldn't work. Maybe he couldn't do it. But that wouldn't matter, would it? He was trying anyways. Intent is all that counts.

"Okay," Jim said and––in a direct contradiction of better judgement––stood on his toes and wrapped his arms around Spock's shoulders.

Spock's hands stayed behind his back but he didn't move, and then Kirk released him and backed into his desk.

Spock saluted and left.

Jim was nauseous. He couldn't move and couldn't breath and couldn't think of anything else. He was right. Kirk defined himself largely by who he was to other people. He was the man who watched Ruth walk away, he was Spock's other half, he was a pain in Leonard McCoy's ass, he was what Janice Lester never could be.

He stayed there in that room for the vast majority of the next two weeks. He went home to get clothes and a toothbrush, and came back and fell asleep in a powder-blue armchair.

He was staring at his ceiling. In the twenty-third century, ceilings aren't stuccoed. You're aware for a fraction of a second that you have no idea who you are or when they stopped using drywall. This is your brain trying to piece together your life story. Maybe you loose something, the last word you thought the night before, or if all of Bob Marley's songs begin with their titles.

He wondered if this was true for God. God has a boss. God has to have a boss. God's boss has a boss too. Just how the universe works. You wonder if God wakes up in the morning, wondering who he is and if he invented drywall or if the people did.


	3. iii

Amanda sighed and put her mug down on the table. She had been behaving as if it were very delicious coffee, even though it was replicated and therefore tasted mostly like nothing. They probably didn't have coffee on Vulcan.

"I needed to see you, is why I came, not the other way around," she said. "Spock wouldn't have done this because he considered it to be the _logical _thing to do. It seemed to me that Spock was sick to death of acting upon _logical, _that time on the way to Babel. He uses it as a justification for his actions, is all. He had to have wanted to do this or he wouldn't have done it. I'm pretty much certain you're the only one who can tell me anything but talking to you is like pulling teeth."

Jim was staring at his hands, trying to think of something to say.

She continued on without him. "He was always absolutely _terrible _at being a Vulcan, but he tried really hard for it. He kind of created a little paradox for himself to live in. His whole _T'san S'at _business seemed to revolve entirely around his desire for belonging; its purpose was to extinguish that part of him that needed a solid sense of community and acceptance. You know that about him. You probably don't know what _T'san S'at_ means, however, but that's hardly important."

Kirk swallowed and looked up at her. "Yes, I assumed as much. I don't know him," present-tense tasted like false optimism. "I suppose it…"

"Of course not," she cut him off, "No one knows anyone. My point is, you know him the best of anyone. Better than I do, at least. Someone else knows _you_ better than anyone. It's probably not Spock. Spock never even knew himself." And then she shifted in her chair and said, "no one _feels _like they know Spock, especially not now. My theory is, no one is completely unpredictable and everyone does everything for a reason. Even if the reason more often than not eludes us."

Jim smiled. "How long has it been since you've been on Earth?"

"Twelve of its years. Four of them since I've been outside Forty-Eridani"

"Well, then, I honestly don't know what we're doing in here," he said, inclining his head toward the window, "it's not raining anymore."

"You're sure excellent at changing the subject." Amanda stood easily and Jim followed suit, and they left the room at the same time.

The air tasted damp and the sun was still dim. Little puddles of water collected on the cement and ran down the fronts of the steps. The wind was trying to untie Amanda's hair as she was lead towards the water. Kirk was standing slightly behind her so it felt like she was leading him. A small bit of coastline laid just past the Expendable building and down a narrow, winding path through exotic plants, some of which unfurled with the air current and clenched themselves back up when they realized someone was looking at them.

The bay was murky, despite the best efforts of hoards of twenty-third century ecologists. "It must be really dull down here on earth, for you, after all of that… gallivanting around the galaxy. It's only appealing to me because I'm so used to Vulcan being hot and dry and the color of sun-dried tomatoes." she looked at him without turning her head.

"Dull is an appropriate choice of word. It's … calm, not always unpleasant."

She nodded.

Pause. "Spock said you 'consider yourself a very fortunate earth woman.' I was never sure what that meant."

"Is that a direct quote?"

"For the most part."

Amanda laughed. "I'm surprised to learn he'd said anything of me."

"It was a rare occurrence."

"Something that no one realizes is that Spock grew up listening to Carol King and folding laundry. Sarek and I pulled him out of school after he mortally injured a student who liked calling him names. After that the two of us would stay home all day while Sarek was at work. Sometimes he would drown himself in scholarly papers about anti de-sitter space. Once he read a ten-volume piece about modern linguistics and for a month afterwords he couldn't stop asking me questions. So sometimes he read and sometimes we just talked. One day he asked me, '_when you were young, did you know you were going to be a linguist?' _ I said that I'd always dreamed of studying language and culture but I never knew my passion would lead me to such a beautiful life. He said, '_You're very fortunate, aren't you? Not many people get to do what they love._' It was meant as an _I love you, _but of course he took it as, _I am very satisfied with my career, _of course. I think that's what he means, for the most part.

"I read his journals for the Terran Space Administration."

"_All_ of them?" Kirk asked, a little taken aback. There were more than a hundred entries. Most of them were lengthy, but not one of them was dry.

"Yes, Admiral, _all _of them. I have quite a bit more free time than you do, I'm sure." Jim filled his cheeks with air and let it out through his lips. "I love that they're all in the archives. It's such a gift to give laymen access to their society's scientific findings and political struggles. The transparency makes the Federation a better place."

He gawked, slightly, and said, "I feel exactly the same way."

Amanda looked over the metal railing at the green-colored water lapping at a few feet of rock. There were bits of seaweed floating in the ripples, bobbing up and down in the waves.

"What did you think?" Jim asked.

She looked up but not at him. "About the journals?"

Jim nodded.

"You're expecting the answer of a proud mother, a civilian, or a linguist. I don't know which. I'll tell you that Spock speaks his Standard like he learned it late in life––which of course isn't true, that as a civilian, I was intrigued, and that the whole thing put Sarek's knickers in a twist."

Jim laughed.

"It did though; he was outraged."

"I honestly can't imagine why."

Amanda fell silent for a few seconds. "Did Spock ever tell you why he chose to retire from Starfleet in the first place?"

Jim shook his head. "I asked him, he said… you know what he said."

"It was the logical thing to do."

"In my humble opinion, retirement isn't _logical_ until you're unfit for duty or you're no longer useful. Spock was neither. Which leaves us with all the other not-so-logical but nevertheless completely understandable motives," he said. "I don't think he had a reason."

"Spock always has a reason."

"Wanting to do something counts as a reason to do it, for most people. Just not Spock. He didn't retire so he could do _this_, I'm sure of that much."

Amanda looked up at him then. He was only two inches taller than her, but the way she was looking made it feel like looking up. Usually Amanda's gaze felt level. "He had a reason, you know it, and you know what it was. You're not an insightful person. You're an understanding person, but not an insightful one. You understood Spock, you don't understand _this_, and neither does anyone else."

Kirk didn't say anything. He felt like Amanda was trying to squeeze out of him what he wasn't willing to admit to himself. It was getting dark.

Amanda yawned, and said, "I need a place to stay."

"You can stay at my place. As long as you don't mind sleeping on my pull out couch."

"Thank you, Admiral, I appreciate it." She smiled.


End file.
